Metadata Management Role: Why It’s Critical & How To Get Started

Metadata management is growing in importance for organizations as data volumes and sources expand, and workers need more and faster access to data to do their jobs. However it takes a concerted effort to build an effective metadata management function to manage, govern, and utilize your data to its fullest potential. 

Our new “Metadata Management Methodology” white paper reveals the potential of metadata management, details five steps for getting started, offers tips for determining your metadata management maturity, and more.

The critical role of metadata management

To effectively search for and find information requires knowledge of the information you seek. Google, for example, crawls and indexes the web to catalog every website. Then, when you search for “Taylor Swift” (we don’t judge), Google can direct you to relevant content.

When it comes to your internal data, you don’t have a Google. So, how can your workers find, understand, and use data effectively? You must locate and understand your data, categorize it, provide context and provenance, and more, and then give workers access to that information. This data about data is metadata, and your organization relies on it. But with data volumes and sources growing, managing your metadata just as effectively as managing the underlying data itself is crucial. 

Metadata management is an important function for organizations today. It encompasses capturing, inventory, and categorizing metadata and enables search, discovery, and data governance. Metadata management also provides insights to data consumers to evaluate the fitness of data and its suitability for the task at hand. More robust metadata management programs also connect data consumers with data owners, data curators, and data stewards to answer questions and provide guidance.

This white paper dives deeper into these and other aspects of a successful and well-structured metadata management program.

Getting started and improving metadata management

The white paper offers tips for selecting a metadata management solution, considerations for creating a metadata management framework, and a five-step process for ensuring your metadata management program gets off to a good start. The steps are as follows:

1. Assign a metadata team

2. Define a metadata strategy

3. Adopt metadata standards and create a framework

4. Deploy a metadata management tool

5. Scale metadata management

Following these metadata management best practices can enable the effective, sustainable, and beneficial use of metadata across an organization.

As your metadata management program begins, you’ll likely want to expand it and improve its effectiveness. The white paper also offers a metadata management maturity model to gauge your current program’s impact, help you highlight areas to bolster, and chart a path forward as you improve and expand your program. Higher levels of metadata management maturity make it easier for workers to search for and discover data, which improves data literacy and helps you build a data culture.

Download the “Metadata Management Methodology” white paper

Now that you understand metadata management better and its importance, download the white paper for more tips, details on the five-step process for starting a metadata management program, and best practices for determining maturity and selecting a solution. 

Get the white paper today.